Customer service was amazing, the guy who runs the entire company called my cell phone to complete a $40 order.

That's because he basically is the entire company. Good guy though. I've used RAAMat in other installations and had no problems with it.

As far as your other issues with the speaker upgrade, your result was pretty consistent with what would be expected. In this case, you connected a 4 ohm speaker to an amp rated for like 20W @ 2 ohms so you're getting more like 10W @ 4 ohms. OEM speakers are typically very efficient as well so not only did you lose power but also gave up some efficiency as well resulting in non-linear performance.

In the L7 case, you connected a 4 ohm speaker to an amp rated at 7 ohms so the actual power went up due to the lower impedence. While this is typically not good for the amp because of the increased heat it produces, sound wise it probably got better because you upgraded to higher quality speakers, squeezed more power out of the OEM amp but probably went down a bit in the efficiency category (effectively a wash with the increased power from the lower impedence).

Adding an aftermarket amp to power those new components will help out quite a bit.